Writing is a political instrument.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.

The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through. Most people had not lived -- nor could it, for that matter, be said that they had died-- through any of their terrible events. They had simply been stunned by the hammer. They passed their lives thereafter in a kind of limbo of denied and unexamined pain. The great question that faced him this morning was whether or not had had ever, really, been present at his life.

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.